


When the World Didn't End

by ameliajean



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-17
Updated: 2012-10-17
Packaged: 2017-11-16 13:05:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/539736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliajean/pseuds/ameliajean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oh it's much, much simpler than all that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the World Didn't End

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scullyseviltwin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullyseviltwin/gifts).



> Leslie, never stop sending me your unfinished work.

When Sherlock Holmes extends his arms and tips himself over the edge, he doesn't just give John Watson the impression of having taken his own life. He doesn't simply slice through metres and metres of nothing to thud against pavement, definitive.

No, it's a bit more complex than that; his fingertips somehow catch in the atmosphere, arms spindling the air itself. 

In defiance of logic, he manages to elegantly twine violence and grace to pull the very sky from its place above the earth. The stars, the wisps of cloud stuck to dull gray, the sun, the moon, everything, and the idea of everything. Everything John ever thought he knew and nothing Sherlock ever cared to learn.

\- - - -

His therapist's words echo in his mind: _"There's stuff you that you wanted to say, but didn't say it. Say it now."_

It's a beat in his ear, like his heart, like the rain. _Say it now._

So he does. But that is very much not the point anymore. It is no longer a cleanly defined and properly labelled capital-R Regret as one tends to have. It is no longer what he couldn't say then or finally says later or says to the flat when it's too goddamned quiet. It's really not what or _when_ anymore, but _why_.

Why are there things he couldn't say?

Sherlock could pick people apart in a fraction of a second and insult them five times over before bothering to stop for breath. He had no problem patronizing John and calling him utterly simple in every possible variant of the word. He'd bare himself in the very heart of the British nation, bum and all, just to make a point. They shared towels and fridge space and Christmases. 

So why? Why _not_?

The things he does say, finally, to the slab rooted in freshly disturbed earth, aren't all that shattering. Perhaps he can attribute keeping those things to himself because it's sentiment, all of it, and those aren't the kind of things one says to a man like Sherlock. But there are no precedents here. Maybe it wouldn't have been jarring after all, then, to say them. He couldn't have known then and he won't ever know, now. There are no other men like Sherlock, and John has never had nor will he ever have another like him.

It's that, then: the having bit. It must be that. The fact that John always allowed himself more time in his mind, years and years of having the man all to himself, and didn't feel compelled every second of every day to soliloquize as they ate toast and pulled at sections of newspaper.

He lets these kinds of thoughts dissipate before they can fully materialize and buys blackout curtains for the windows in the main room, hoping that one tactic or the other will keep the _why_ away.

(They don't.)

\- - - -

In the powerless, stark, blindingly bright second just before falling to sleep and just after waking, the same moment replays itself in John's mind. It isn't the coat flapping above flailing limbs or the bomb or the gun or-

No, it's nothing like that. Nothing at all, really.

A perfect afterimage: it's night and they're walking through the city, beneath the arches in Vauxhall, and there is no fog that evening. Sherlock remarks upon the beauty of the stars and John's world shifts. Newton never sat beneath an apple tree, and oh but for the grace, if only he hadn't. If only those things didn't immediately fill him: all of the things he doesn't say until he's saying them to a headstone.

Sometimes John will sit frozen at the foot of his bed with one sock on and the other rolled in his palm, elbow on his knee, wondering why he could be such a coward with his words when Sherlock so fearlessly gave his _life_. John knows it was to protect him. Somehow he knows this, just as surely as he knows the earth revolves around the sun, and it only serves to make him feel worse. _Responsible_. With all of his unsaid words like stones in his pocket, weighing him down.

Maybe it's just that he didn't realize that they weren't his words at all.

Because there was this moment—this flicker—of something, just before the end of it all, when he felt his best friend laugh and cry in the same breath, and could do absolutely nothing to fix it.

He decides that his cowardice extends beyond hoarding his thankful words and sentimental notions. It reaches right up into his chest and twists. It put Sherlock Holmes on that roof, with no real words of his own, right up to the very end and beyond it.

He tears down the blackout curtains and the sky is still empty.

\- - - -

One afternoon when he's particularly cross with the wobbling leg on his chair, he doesn't continue stuffing papers beneath it. He pulls it apart properly and digs a few tools out of the junk cupboard. 

Joints ache as he settles onto the floor and neglects to glance at the dust that's slowly begun to settle on the chair opposite his own. Soon, screws are scattered about and day slips into night. He hasn't a clue what he's doing but the menial task of picking something apart just to put it back together again allows his mind to wander.

They're short bursts, splashes of color against flat white at first.

_Doesn't mean-_

He freezes as if ceasing motion will help to recapture the _exact_ words.

_Doesn't mean I can't-_

And he's so close to hearing all of it, in the ever-fading baritone so very absent from their flat.

 _Doesn't mean I can't appreciate it_.

The lines of John's face crease in the absolute sickest combination of joy and sorrow, and he is sure in that moment, surer than he has ever been of anything, that the stars will alight and the moon will be pulled back into its orbit. It will all return and he will find his voice smoothed between cirrus, captured within each plunk of rainwater. Altitude and longitude and latitude, it will fill oceans and chasms and all of the secret places they made their own.

\- - - -

He doesn't get to speak first. 

It isn't the soft utterance of his name, or an exhausted plea for understanding.

The man stands before him, ragged and ethereal at the same time, eyes glinting in the dark. John appraises him with feet planted firmly on the ground; he isn't in shock, nor does he feel the immediate need to touch or know or right this cosmic imbalance. There are words that will come later, when the _why_ is too quiet for the rest of the world and just loud enough to mean something, _everything_.

"If I'd known then what I know now," Sherlock says, unwavering, as if he's had months to turn these words over and over until they are smooth. "If I'd known for certain, I would have made sure you knew."

John inhales deeply and exhales slowly.

"I did."

Sherlock's irises flicker near-white gray beneath the cloudless sky and he gesticulates helplessly, without words, without the absolving notion that maybe John never knew, never worked out why, never connected the dots like constellations in order to figure out just exactly why his best friend pulled heaven to earth for him.

His chest constricts. "When?"

John laughs despite himself, because _when_ vexed him for so long, and it was never quite the issue in the first place. "Oh, does it even matter, Sherlock? Really?"

In the fleeting moment he casts his eyes upward, just to see, just to check, the near-gravitational pull demands Sherlock close the space between them. Long fingers splay and grasp, arms tighten around shoulders, and John thinks then, _well, the world didn't end_.


End file.
